Kandinsky has the most important insight of his career in the years leading up to the First World War. He works in Munich, Germany, and develops a new pictorial language, which helps him create original abstract paintings in different series. And the most famous of these will be called Compositions.
Kandinsky considers these compositions to be the result of his artistic philosophy. He only makes 10 in his entire life, and each is the result of careful planning. Composition VII, of which we speak today, is widely recognized as the most beautiful and most complex of all.
Obviously, the compositions are very controversial from the very beginning. Viewers find themselves in front of large abstract paintings and are completely baffled. To the first who saw them, the paintings seem chaotic, with no recognizable subject, structure or form.
Kandinsky explains the philosophy behind his new approach in a treatise entitled The Spiritual in Art of 1911. In this work, color is a fundamental element. Kandinsky has always considered color as the most crucial element in his paintings and is influenced by the writings of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Steiner argues that each color, each perception of light represents a spiritual tone. So Kandinsky takes a step forward and invents his own color code, attributing spiritual values to each different shade.
When he describes the tone of a color he uses a musical analogy and compares it to timbre. With this, Kandinsky is able to vary the sensation and emotion that his paintings transmit to us.
He also uses lines to energize his paintings of him. The parallel horizontal lines, for example, make the image more stable, especially on the sides of the work. While the red diagonal line suggests that there is a structure underneath. Kandinsky goes to great lengths to hide any element that may be recognizable which is sometimes called "figurative" in his abstract works. But some elements can still be identified.
From a technical point of view, the works vary according to the type of image he wants to represent. He titles some of his works Impressions or Improvisations and these are neither studied nor planned. But something changes with the compositions. Each of these works is elaborated and studied and Composition VII is perhaps the most elaborate of all.
What Kandinsky really wishes to recreate in art through these works are the characteristics of the music. His favorite composer is Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music.
He manages to combine a passion for color and music, making them the basis of his abstract style. He believes that art is based on the perceptual phenomenon of synaesthesia - according to which the stimulation of one sense leads to the stimulation of another.
In the period leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, he made rapid progress towards abstract painting. Just two years before the creation of Composition VII, the subjects of his paintings are still quite explicit and realistic.
But how does it then come to abstractionism? And what does abstract mean? If we reflect carefully among all the new forms of art and movements that emerged in the 1900s, abstract art is undoubtedly the most enduring over time. Any work of art that does not represent a recognizable element can be described as abstract. In the years preceding the outbreak of the First World War, the birth of abstract art is a phenomenon that can be considered international. In fact, it emerged more or less in the same years in different countries. In all different ways. The artists of the period discovered the possibility of using color and shapes but not necessarily to represent reality.
At the beginning of the 1900s many examples of abstractionism can be made: some works by Sonia Delaunay from 1913 in which human figures are transformed into geometric shapes. Or some of Duchamp's works such as The Nude Descending the Stairs of 1912. Malevic's Black Square of 1915 or Mondrian's works. However, in the attempts of maximum abstraction there is no interest on the part of the artist to represent or have any of the elements of nature or reality recognized. The works enhance the shape, color, line.
00:00 Intro
00:31 Analysis
02:06 Details
05:39 Kandinsky
07:52 Abstractionism
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21 июл 2024